Let Them Drink Coke by Peter Kurthwww.dissidentvoice.org
November 27,
2003

So,
they’re going to fry the Sniper, are they? Good work, America! Evidently,
John Moo-ha-ha Muhammad, the elder of the two snipers under charge, never
actually pulled the trigger of the gun that killed 13 people last year in
the Washington, D.C. area. But he’s going to his death all the same,
inasmuch as the “strong influence” he had on his (just barely) underage
accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, is thought to have been the … uh, trigger for
Malvo’s murder spree.

Got it? Malvo will
undoubtedly get off, in one way or another, either by grace of his youth or
on grounds of insanity, whichever comes first. But Muhammad will die,
because -- well, his name is Muhammad and his murders weren’t sanctioned by
the U.S. military. The only way you get to kill people lawfully in this
country is by going to war. Then you can do whatever you want.

Please understand me -- I’m
trying to keep up. I was all set to write about President Bush’s trip to
England when this Muhammad thing came up, Michael Jackson got arrested for
child molestation and People ran a cover story featuring Amber Frey,
“The Other Woman” in the Laci-Peterson-and-Her-Unborn-Son-Connor murder
trial in California. Laci‘s husband, and Connor‘s father, Scott Peterson, is
charged with killing them both a couple of Christmases ago -- again, without
sanction of warfare, and therefore, you know, illegally.

Talk about dumb! All he had
to do was go to Iraq or Afghanistan and he could have killed anyone he
wanted! For that matter, I expect he could do it here, provided the person
he murdered was suspected of “terrorism” or its intent. The war on terror is
going to be won, you see, by terror, terror, and more terror. It’s in the
Bible -- “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” etc., etc., ad nauseam
and infinitum.

"If they [the terrorists]
think they are going to somehow weaken us or make us think, well, let's
shuffle to the back of the queue and hide away from this, they are wrong,"
said British Prime Minister Tony Blair last week in London, during a press
conference with Dubya that was staged only hours after a couple of bombs
went off in Turkey and killed dozens of people. Among the dead was the
British consul-general in Istanbul -- that is to say, a white man, one of
ours, and thus an “innocent victim” of the evil-doers.

You might think that a lot
of Turks walking past the consulate that day were innocent, too, but you’re
forgetting their crazy clothes and their nutty religion, which promises
martyrs -- sorry, girls, only males! -- a big banquet in heaven and 70
virgins apiece if they give up their lives for Allah. Thank God we don’t
have people like that in this country! We’ll make do with the Ten
Commandments, if “liberals,” “leftists” and “a runaway judiciary” don’t
sabotage the intent of the Founding Fathers by making us all marry
homosexuals under penalty of law!

Of course, foreigners are
funny to begin with, as President and Mrs. Bush can tell you after their
visit to London. Not only did the Queen serve five kinds of wine at the
official banquet in Buckingham Palace, but she wouldn’t even give Dubya a
Coke when he asked for one.

Criminy! And these are our
friends, our “coalition” partners! They played the theme song from Titanic
at the dinner party, along with “tunes from South Pacific,” “Greensleeves”
and “It’s Now or Never” -- and still the people went tramping through the
streets, 100,000 strong, or 200,000 if you believe the protest organizers.

Let’s meet in the middle
and say it was 150,000 -- that’s still a lot of liberals and leftists who
don’t seem to know what freedom means, who don’t know how lucky they are to
be able to gather and protest in any way they want. True, Bush never saw
them, shielded as he was from all signs of disagreement. And when he says
that the Iraqi people weren't allowed to march through Baghdad until the
coalition freed them from “the lash of Saddam Hussein” -- well, I don’t
think anyone wants to put it to the test. Two of our soldiers have already
been murdered this week in Mosul, their bodies dragged from their jeep and
robbed by an angry horde of teenagers. So let’s not try to guess what might
happen if the Iraqis took to the streets en masse and gave Dubya a piece of
their mind. Ingrates!

Meantime, Laura forgot to
take off her gloves when she shook hands with the Queen -- tsk, tsk! Dubya
kept clapping Her Majesty on the back, even though no one is allowed to
touch her, ever, unless a bomb is about to go off and she needs to be pushed
under a table or something. She’s said to be “furious” right now over the
mess the Americans have made of her lawn -- angrier than anyone has ever
seen her, in fact. Trees and shrubs dating back to the time of Queen
Victoria were destroyed last week by Bush’s helicopters, his bullet-proof
Cadillac, his 250 bodyguards, 15 sniffer dogs, 50 White House political
aides, 20 armored vehicles, three jumbo aircraft, and the man who gets to
carry the button to set off the atom bomb -- should that become necessary in
the war against evil.

Even the royal flamingoes
have fled, according to report, “traumatized” by Ding-Dong’s stomp across
England, now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bush cartel.

Peter Kurth
is the author of international bestselling books including Anastasia: The
Riddle of Anna Anderson, Isadora: A Sensational Life, and a
biography of the anti-fascist journalist Dorothy Thompson, American
Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson. His essays have appeared in
Salon, Vanity Fair, New York Times Book Review, and many others. Peter lives
in Burlington, Vermont. He can be reached at:
peterkurth@peterkurth.com. Visit his website at:
http://www.peterkurth.com/